OTTAWA—The man in charge of elections in Canada says that he’d rather have no bill at all than the Conservative government’s proposed Fair Elections Act, because of the harm it is going to do to thousands of Canadians’ voting rights.

In an exclusive interview with the Star, chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand said that many Canadians may find in 2015 they would have been better off without the Fair Elections Act.

No bill at all, Mayrand said, would be “certainly better for the tens of thousands of electors who will be denied the right to vote … I certainly can’t endorse a bill that disenfranchises electors.”

Mayrand is very worried about how the Fair Elections Act would prohibit votes cast by people who show up at the ballot box with only voter-information cards or with friends, family or neighbours “vouching” for them. It’s estimated that about 120,000 people voted this way in 2011, and many of those people were seniors, youth, aboriginal Canadians or disadvantaged citizens.

The bill aims to fix a problem that doesn’t exist, Mayrand argues, noting that of all the millions of ballots cast in the 2008 and 2011 federal elections, a grand total of 18 complaints were lodged about possible ineligible voting.

It’s also not an issue that ever came up in Mayrand’s regular consultations with an advisory group of all the political parties — including the ruling Conservatives. “Not once,” he said.

An Angus Reid Global poll last week showed that 62 per cent of Canadians believe that the Conservative government is settling political scores with its Fair Elections Act — in particular against Elections Canada.

But Mayrand says neither he nor his office should be on the minds of voters as they pore through this legislation — which he believes may be the first major electoral-reform bill in Canada that limits, rather than expands voters’ rights.

“We need to focus more on what it means for the right of Canadians to vote and what it means in terms of instilling fairness in our electoral process and trust in that process,” Mayrand said.

Canadians are concerned, he says, about the so-called “robocalls” affair, currently before the courts and in which a Federal Court judge has already issued a ruling about a widespread effort to suppress votes of non-Conservative supporters.

But while Mayrand believes that the Fair Elections Act offers some reassurances on this score — requiring parties to register their automated calling efforts — he also says it creates new opportunities for political parties to get their hands on voter information to feed into databases that all parties use for automated calls and micro-targeting campaigns.

“If we have to go there, should we not have the basic protection of privacy?” Mayrand. “We all know that parties are gathering ever more data on citizens, but nobody knows what that data is, we have no right to find out what data is held on any citizen, we don’t know the error rate in that data, we don’t know how it’s being used, how it’s being protected and we don’t know when there’s a breach … In our modern society, I don’t see how this can continue to be.”

Mayrand says he isn’t convinced either that the bill gives authorities any significant power to track down people who use those databases and automated calls for voter-suppression efforts, such as those that took place in the 2011 election.

He had hoped that the Fair Elections Act would contain provisions that would allow for investigators to compel witnesses to give testimony, as well as access to the phone numbers used by robocallers. But these measures aren’t in the legislation.

Pierre Poilievre, Minister of State for Democratic Reform, has been saying that the Fair Elections Act has been built out of many recommendations put forward by Mayrand and insists that the chief electoral officer was consulted.

But Mayrand says that of all the serious issues he laid on the table when he and Poilievre spoke last summer, only about two of the proposals he made can be found in the bill. As for the four amendments that Poilievre agreed to this week, Mayrand says they amount to minor “housekeeping.”

Most modern democracies — and Canada itself — usually make sure that election-reform laws are built after wide public consultation and consensus among the political parties, Mayrand argues. On this front, the Fair Elections Act also breaks from international and historic tradition, Mayrand said — as well as the advice that Canada often gives to emerging democracies.

“You have to bring everyone, political actors, of course, but also civil society,” Mayrand said. “An election is not only about politicians — it’s about citizens.”

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